Les Mikesell wrote at about 14:05:27 -0500 on Monday, August 31, 2009: > Peter Walter wrote: > > For me, the matter could be resolved if a > > way was found to at least backup a backuppc server in a reasonable > > fashion without requiring particular filesystems and utilities such as > > zfs send/receive. > > But there is a reasonable way: unmount the partition and image-copy the > raw disk or partition. Given that the issue with other approaches is > that the head has to seek all over the place to access the same amount > of data through the filesystem, this solves the problem neatly with one > linear pass. Or, get the same effect by raid-mirroring to your backup > device so you only have to unmount momentarily to fail/remove the other > copy. Zfs improves on this since it has an incremental mode that is > still based on the block device. >
This still is not a solution for all of us. First, I store the backups on a consumer-level NAS device that does not easily facilitate adding partitions without additional hacking and risks to data integrity. The device also does not support LVM. I do not want to have copy a whole 1TB partition just to copy over a few hundred GB of backuppc data. Second, at some point, I may want to move the pool to another drive or server and I don't want to have to fiddle with low level block copy and partition resizing in the hope that I can get it right without making mistakes in either the partition itself, the underlying LVM setup, or the further underlying (software) RAID setup -- I have done this manually before and it takes real care to get the sequence right and not do something stupid. Finally, at a minimum, the installation document for BackupPC should clearly warn users to use a dedicated partition with LVM for TopDir if they want to have any hope of practically backing up, transferring, or expanding their backup directory in the future. I really fail to understand the dogged resistance to finding a viable solution to a well-known and repeated issue with BackupPC that does not rely on filesystem level kludges. I could see if this were given as a temporary workaround but why should we continue to see this as the ideal solution rather than trying to work on a more robust and comprehensive solution even if it falls to a long-term roadmap item. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
